


Felix and the Drowned Boy

by muurmuur



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, And they were roommates: hard mode, Implied/Reference Suicide Attempts, M/M, Mutual Pining, Past Abuse, Past Drug Addiction, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:35:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26899051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muurmuur/pseuds/muurmuur
Summary: Some people might pity him, but Felix enjoys his tidy, nine-to-five life. It’s safe. Stable. Predictable. Think of it like his apartment: it isn’t flashy, but it’s comfortable. Maybe that’s why he’s so hesitant to welcome Sylvain inside when he finds him waiting at his door, unexpected and uninvited, after seven bitter years spent apart.Just one night,Sylvain begs. Felix knows better than to believe him. For some damned reason, he still lets him in.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 33
Kudos: 152





	1. Two Men at Nine

Felix lives a perfectly normal, respectable life. Nine to five, two bedrooms one bath, an alarm set for five-thirty-five. He takes the six-ten train from the Rhodos station straight to Central five days a week, seven stops in between. He eats dinner packed in two to four neatly sealed bags on ice delivered in boxes to his door. Afterwards he watches two hours of television from nine to eleven. Bed at eleven thirty. Twenty-four-seven, three-sixty-five.

It isn’t what he’d expected when he’d been asked about what he’d one day become. In his early twenties he’d allowed himself to feel disillusioned about it, but as he neared closer to thirty, his self pity lost some of its edge. He mended a few broken things, too. His relationship with his father, firstly, although the bonds between them still seem tenuous at best. He patched his rift with Dimitri as well. That’d ended in a bit of a disaster, despite all good intentions. But that’s the big takeaway, isn’t it? Things don’t always go according to plan.

He’s not the star athlete of his boyhood dreaming, for example. Not that those dreams had ever amounted to anything more than hypothetical flashbulbs and marquee lights. That was probably the problem: not physical shortcomings nor underfed dedication, but rather a profound lack of imagination. Instead of throwing all of his tension into drills, Felix now stares at a computer screen during his daylight hours, finessing spreadsheets to wrangle his father’s wealth into neat lines. The firm is small enough that the nepotism still seems charming, although the number of zeros behind every budget sometimes leaves a bad taste in his mouth.

Still, it isn’t so bad. Plenty of people have it far worse. Hell, so had he, back when he’d been nothing more than caustic loathing aimed at all sides. He can manage boredom. Disappointment, even, from time to time. Everyone does. He sees it now in a way that he’d never really understood before. Bowed heads on a subway train, bobbing along with the bumps in the tracks. You go with the current. There’s no way forward but ahead.

Of course, maybe that’s exactly what people think when they’re on a train barreling towards a bridge loaded with dynamite. Go with the flow and suddenly you’re falling, and from no fault of your own. Shit. That’s the other takeaway. Sometimes life’s just one long swan dive.

Felix’s bomber turns out to be Sylvain. He shouldn’t be surprised. Sylvain has always been an explosion, unexpected and violent. Still, Felix is so shocked to find him loitering in the grey-on-grey hallway outside his apartment that he very nearly stops on step nine of the stairs and runs away. _Where the hell would you go_ , a voice inside his head chides him, and yet he mulls over the idea of sleeping on the street before he finally musters the courage— or maybe the spite—to close the final four strides keeping them apart.

“Hey,” Sylvain says with a sunny smile, as if his uninvited arrival is simply the breach of a three-day absence instead of seven years of unanswered calls.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

Sylvain winces like a cowered dog caught chewing on a pair of shoes. Felix grips the handle of his briefcase so hard that he’s surprised it doesn’t suffocate.

“Long time no see, right?” Sylvain rubs the back of his head. It’s a tic that Felix knows too well. He hates how easy it still is to read him, as if he’s just some pulpy, airport-bookstore throwaway. Everything else about him is the same too, somehow, despite the magnitude of the years between them: shaggy hair, freckled cheeks, even that hint of his ruined adolescence-in-stasis hidden in a pair of jeans and a faded t-shirt. “Nice suit.”

It is a nice suit. Felix had it made to measure. It’s hard to find anything off the rack that fits his arms as well as the taper of his waist. He assumes that the average corporate lackey isn’t built like he’s been beating the shit out of sandbags and sparring partners for years. Seven years, in fact. Funny how that math pans out.

“You look like shit,” Felix bites back. He can’t help himself. He’s always needed a muzzle, as far as Sylvain’s concerned. It’s not like it’s the truth. Sylvain has bags under his eyes, sure, and his clothes have that wrinkled look of too many hours spent on a bus, but he still looks good. That’s another one of his tics: seduction, even when he’s falling apart. Felix can’t help but wonder what stage he’s at now. Are the rafters that hold his insides together simply creaking, or has the dry-rot finally condemned him to a full loss?

“Good to see you, too,” Sylvain quips. Felix shifts from one heel to the next. His body responds, familiar with the old boxer’s bounce. Yeah, maybe it’d feel good to finally swing that overdue sucker punch against Sylvain’s perfect jawline. Sylvain lifts his palms up at him submissively, as if he’d spent those seven lost years learning how to read minds instead of getting high in the armpit of the world.

“Listen, I... Sorry. This is crazy.” Some of the shellac flakes from his fake smile. “I know I shouldn’t be here, but I don’t really have anywhere else to go.”

“You’re in Fhirdiad,” Felix replies dryly. “There’s plenty of places to go.”

“Yeah, well, not places I should be.” Sylvain is shrinking. Felix feels like he’s in a funhouse. Maybe someone came and rearranged the hallway to make big things look small. Smoke and mirrors. That seems like something Sylvain would do.

“What do you want, Sylvain?”

Sylvain’s eyes dart from Felix’s face to the chevrons in the carpet. He’s weighing the value of being honest. Felix knows this game, too. It’s not difficult to decode. It’s never been chess with Sylvain, after all. Every time it’s Russian roulette, and Sylvain never plays fair. He always hogs the revolver. Can’t help himself from shoving the muzzle into his mouth.

“I think I just burned my last bridge,” Sylvain admits finally. He ducks his head and offers Felix another beaten-mutt smile. “I know I don’t deserve this, but do you think I could crash with you? Just for the night?”

“Get a hotel room.”

“I’m a little low on cash at the moment.”

“So sell some of your shit. Go to a hostel. I don’t care. You’re not my problem.” That last part slips out by accident. It’s more of a mantra than a jab, really, the sort of thing that he’s supposed to keep all to himself.

Sylvain laughs. “Yeah, I know. I get it. You’re right.” He sighs and dips to snatch up a ratty duffel bag hidden behind his legs. “I’m sorry,” he adds, his voice suddenly so honest it sounds like he’s singing a hymn. “I shouldn’t have come here and screwed up your night.”

Felix stands his ground. It’s important to show that he’s not afraid. He thinks about old camping trips out in the Fraldarius mountains. There were plenty of wolves out there, but the real danger was always the bears. He can’t remember if he’s supposed to fight back or play dead.

“Sorry,” Sylvain says again. He slinks past him towards the stairs. The air in the hallway feels like its on fire. Why does it always have to be like this? Why can’t Sylvain stop himself from playing with such high fucking stakes?

“One night,” Felix barks just when the first step squeaks under Sylvain’s weight. He peeks at him through the bannister, suddenly reverent, as if Felix is some kind of fucked up saint. “One night, and then I don’t want to see you again. I don’t care if you freeze to death downstairs.” 

“One night,” Sylvain agrees, loping towards him while Felix stomps forward to unlock the door. “Thank you so much, Felix. I’m really sorry about this. You’re really...Thanks.”

Felix swings the door open and storms inside to run away from answering him. The apartment greets him like it always does: empty, neat, cool. He flicks on the lights and tosses his briefcase to skid along the bar splitting the kitchen from the living room.

“Wow. This is a nice place.”

Felix can’t tell if Sylvain is being sarcastic. It’s a funny side effect of growing up in a hothouse. Even Rodrigue chastises him for his austerity, but quite frankly Felix isn’t sure what the hell he’d do with any more space. He lives in a nice enough neighborhood. His commute is tolerable. The building’s price range protects him from the danger of rubbing elbows with anyone he’d recognize from his silver spooned past. It’s perfect, as far as he’s concerned. He figures that Sylvain can relate. Then again, Sylvain had taken the prospect of normalcy to the extreme when he’d made a bonfire from his inheritance and crawled on top like a goddamned funeral pyre. 

“You can sleep on the couch,” Felix instructs him, tugging the knot from his tie as he walks to a nearby closet and hunts for a blanket and a spare pillow kept special for rare houseguests. “Don’t touch anything.”

Sylvain laughs. Felix turns and watches as he slips out of his shoes. He leaves them neatly at the doormat, despite the fact that the hard heels of Felix’s oxfords are still clacking against the floorboards.

“No touching. I promise.”

“And be quiet.”

“As a mouse,” Sylvain pledges, pressing a finger to his lips to prove the point. Felix rolls his eyes and drops the bedding onto the brutalist sectional planted at the center of the main room. They stare at each other for a moment afterwards. Felix is struck by the ridiculous urge to take off his jacket and wave it at him like a toreador. He finds middle ground by shrugging it off and slinging it over one of the barstools instead. Sylvain’s socked feet slowly pad deeper into the room, careful to safeguard the space between them. 

“Are you still working for your dad?”

“Yes,” Felix replies. Between silence and trite questions, he supposes that the latter will bring the evening to a quicker end. He slips around the bar and into the kitchen, falling behind the shield of the refrigerator door as he examines the shelves inside with a distinct lack of appetite. He’d been relegated to a company dinner that night under his father’s strict instruction. He doesn’t care what Sylvain did or didn’t eat. He’s not a stray. He’s not going to give him a goddamned bowl of milk and a pat on the head.

“That’s great!”

Felix ignores the cheery veneer of Sylvain’s voice and leans deeper into the fridge. His eyes skid across a clutch of beer cans, mouth watering for a moment before he thinks better of it and hides them behind a carton of orange juice. He snatches a pitcher of water instead.

“You’ll be running that place in no time,” Sylvain continues smoothly. Felix shrugs, reaching for an overhead cabinet to fetch a pair of glasses. It’s annoying how overwhelming his good manners are. Certainly it would’ve been far more satisfying to splash the pitcher in Sylvain’s face, but here he is, giving him a drink, just like his father would have wanted. Well, just like he would’ve wanted if Felix wasn’t playing host to an unwelcome Fraldarius-Gautier reunion.

“Business management, right? Do you like it?”

“It’s work,” Felix replies flatly.

“Thanks,” Sylvain answers when Felix hands him a glass. He takes a drink before setting it aside, careful to hunt for a nearby coaster before he risks leaving a ring on the shiny steel bar top. “Yeah, I guess so,” he continues. “Still. Honest day’s work, and all of that.”

Felix grunts. That makes Sylvain grin. His smiles are rarely honest, but his grins are usually made of realer stuff. Felix feels like he’s just stepped into his childhood bedroom. Goddamned nostalgia. It’s a threat when Sylvain’s involved, like a bare beach pulled back to show its hidden treasures in advance of a surge.

“What are you doing in Fhirdiad?”

Sylvain withers slightly at the question. He takes another drink. “Running, I guess,” he admits, eyes hooded beneath his pale lashes. “Figured it would be a good enough place for a new start.”

Felix snorts. “How many new starts do you get?”

“Ha,” Sylvain agrees with the wag of his head, a new smile plastered across his lips, “I’ve got a good collection, right? But I mean, I’m doing okay. Really. I don’t want to mess it up this time.”

Felix cocks a brow and lets himself stare at Sylvain for long enough to see what he really means. He looks healthy enough to be at stage one of his newest new start. His skin has some color to it. He’s not a skeleton. Felix could be tricked into thinking that he’s sober. He’s fallen for it before. Stage two is inevitable, in any case. He’s learned that much firsthand. Better not to think about it in case he conjures it here and now.

“Whose bridge did you burn?” Felix can’t help but ask. Sylvain makes a face at him, confused for a second before he remembers their conversation in the hall.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe not for you,” Felix shoots back. It’s a headstone over the full six feet of things he really wants to say to him, but it’s not like Sylvain gave him advance notice before he decided to reappear in his life. He needs time to wrestle everything into words. In any case, he knows from experience that Sylvain can see the graveyard long before he’s standing in it. No doubt he’ll sit patiently and nod along whenever Felix finally scrapes together all of that darkness inside his chest and throws it at him.

“I know,” Sylvain replies. “I know, you’re right. It’s no one that you know. She—”

“ _She_ ,” Felix echoes tersely. He’s so fucking predictable. Sylvain hunches against his verdict, mouth warped behind his slippery glass.

“Old habits die hard,” Sylvain admits. It makes Felix so angry that he very nearly does drench him with the pitcher, after all. “Anyway, it was my fault.”

“It’s always your fault.”

Felix turns and replaces the pitcher in its spot inside the fridge. The cool air does wonders for the flush ripping through his skin. It’s late. He’s had a long day. He isn’t prepared to resurrect the dead. He can feel the earth slanting downwards beneath his feet. It’s aimed at a pit filled with ugly things that he’ll regret if he voices them aloud. He catches himself just before its too late. Closes the door. Turns to look across the bar again. Sylvain might as well be on his back and showing him his belly. What the hell is he going to get from kicking him while he’s down?

“I’m going to bed,” Felix finishes. “The bathroom is the second door on the right.” Sylvain nods. “I want you gone in the morning.”

Sylvain smiles. “Sure thing. Just visiting. I promise.”

Felix huffs and pivots around the end of the bar to point himself towards his bedroom. He finishes pulling his tie slack while he walks. It feels good to grip something.

“Hey,” Sylvain says just as Felix’s fingers curl around the doorknob. “It’s good to see you, Felix.”

It’s a stupid, chintzy phrase. Felix can see it penned across a postcard in chunky pastel cursive. _It’s good to see you!_ against a blue sky framed with bowed palm trees. Below, a pair of waving, busty girls in matching bikinis dancing a circle around Sylvain’s bloated corpse. _That’s how I thought I’d see you next_ , he wants to shout. _You stupid, fucking selfish bastard._ All of that tumbles together in Felix’s throat and sticks there like wet newspaper. He doesn’t say anything. He slips through the door and shuts it. Doesn’t slam it, even, but simply lets it slip into place as easy as if he were alone.

His room is dark. Everything is as he left it: the bed neatly made, the end tables empty except for an alarm clock on one and a minimalist lamp on the other. He tosses aside his tie and struggles with his shirt buttons. Seven hours and thirty-two minutes until tomorrow comes. He has four meetings scheduled, forty-five minutes each, twenty minutes apart. He counts them across his fingertips. Three dots, three dashes, three dots. Two boys, two years apart. It’s simple arithmetic. His life is a spreadsheet. He knows how it goes. It always ends in zeros.

* * *

“You’re joking,” Ingrid gasps over a plate of untouched sashimi. Felix stares at her lunch and feels an odd sense of commiseration with the fish. 

“Why would I joke about something like this?”

“I didn’t even know he was in Faerghus.”

She stabs the glob of wasabi with her chopstick and smears it along the side of her plate. Felix listens to the patter of the rain against the windows next to their little table and does his best not to crawl inside himself. Talk to me, Ingrid has begged him plenty of times before. She’s paid the dues for him to be honest with her. He owes her for it, really, just like he’d once been so certain that he owed Sylvain something as well.

“Well, he’s here now,” he sighs. He snatches his glass and takes a long drink before settling his gaze on her again. “He showed up at my door at nine o’clock last night, slept on my couch, and cooked me a goddamned continental breakfast.”

Ingrid’s frown quirks into a crooked grin. “He always did make the best breakfasts.”

“That isn’t the point.”

“How does he look?” she quickly pivots, lips falling into a stern line once more. 

“Fine.”

In truth, he’d looked good after a night’s sleep, even if it’d been abridged in time for him to cobble together a full spread of fried bacon, potatoes, poached eggs, toast, even fucking _hollandaise_. When they’d been younger, Sylvain had always teased Felix for his country-club taste in breakfast, and yet there he was at five in the morning, whisking egg yolks by hand because he didn’t want to make too much noise with the goddamned blender. The weepier parts of Felix’s well-guarded ego had nearly shattered at the sight of him clear-eyed in his kitchen, humming under his breath, flesh on his bones, alive. 

“He looks like a person,” he admits. Ingrid nods knowingly.

“You know, I talked to Dorothea maybe, I don’t know, five, six months ago, and she mentioned that she saw him in Enbarr. Said he looked really good. Maybe he’s finally taking things seriously?”

“I’m not going to bet money on it,” Felix scoffs. “Best case scenario, he’s a drifter at thirty-fucking-one years old. He couldn’t even get a bed at the Y.”

“You know he doesn’t like to stay anywhere alone,” Ingrid argues, eyes sparking with whatever stubborn heat Felix knows must be in his own as well. They’ve always been competitive with one another. Funerals and two a.m. overdoses reversed under green emergency room lights hadn’t changed that, at least.

“Don’t,” Felix interjects. He knows where this is going. Sylvain isn’t the only one who’s so frustratingly predictable.

“You can’t just kick him out in this!” Ingrid points at the grey downpour outside.

“Why not?”

She crosses her arms. “It’ll be snow by the end of the week.”

“Better for him to leave now, then.”

“Felix.”

“I’m not going to do it,” he grits between his teeth. “I’m not going to be responsible for him again.”

Ingrid’s face falls. She turns away, worrying her chopsticks between her fingers while she mulls over what he’s said. Felix feels a guilty stab in his gut. He knows what she’s thinking. He’s struggled with it himself, but in the end it’s all a maze with one singular path to the center, and that path isn’t the one where they all smash themselves against the breakwater of Sylvain’s self destruction. She has to understand that, too. It’s madness not to. 

“I don’t think he’d come to you if he just meant to mess everything up,” she mutters.

“Come on,” Felix gasps, exasperated. _Don’t do this to me._

“Me, maybe. All of his girls, sure. But he’s always wanted to impress you, Felix. We’ve been telling him to get his life together for years. He’s got no one else left. You know that’s true. I’m not... I don’t think we should turn him away, if he’s finally doing something right.”

“I can’t do it, Ingrid.”

“I’ll help you.” She sets aside the chopsticks to reach across the table, catching his hands in hers before he can leap away. She hates losing people. He knows this. He knows why, too. All of them, their little childhood gang, they’d all been born with a ball chained to their ankles just as much as they’d been blessed with wealth and privilege and well-managed trust funds. The only lead weight that Felix hasn’t yet named is his own, and he’s damned well not going to do it over a table filled with lunch special sushi.

“I’ll help you, I promise,” Ingrid begs. “Whatever you need. I just have a feeling about this, you know? I feel like it’s our best chance.”

Felix shuts his eyes and groans. It’s easier to be impertinent than frightened, which is how he really feels. When he opens them again Ingrid is smiling at him, pink cheeked and teary eyed.

“You’re a good person, Felix.”

“Don’t say it like it’s such a surprise,” he sighs. Ingrid laughs and squeezes his hands. She says something afterwards, but the drumroll of the rain outside and her voice both sound the same. He toys over this newest calculation in his head just like the last: wonders if it’s simple madness that he somehow knows that one plus one plus one can’t possibly sum to three, or if it’s something worse.

* * *

“What the hell is this?” 

The pile of pastries stare back at him enigmatically. Felix frowns and shakes his umbrella over the doormat, propping it against the nearby bookshelf afterwards to drip dry into a shallow tin dish procured for this very purpose three years before.

“You’re back!” Sylvain’s voice shouts from the bathroom. He emerges soon after, just as damp as Felix is from his dash through the strange tempest of a city downpour. True to form, Sylvain is bare skinned aside from the towel cinched low around his hips.

 _You’re supposed to be gone_ , Felix could snap.

“You’re dripping on the floor,” he growls instead.

“Sorry! Sorry.” Sylvain dashes back into the bathroom. Felix takes the moment to slip out of his coat and the damp blazer beneath, hooking both on a rack adorned by a full spread of black and grey options suited for every turn of Fhirdiad’s fickle weather. Sylvain rustles sight unseen before reemerging dressed in jeans again, this time topped by a seersucker shirt that’s worn so thin that he might as well have not bothered with it. He scuttles over the puddle he’d made with his socks, soaking up the water without a worry about tracking it everywhere once he’s done.

Felix takes the opportunity to make a closer inspection of him. He’s got all of the same old scars as before, but it doesn’t look like he’s earned many new ones. Felix isn’t certain if that’s good news, or just a sign that he’s gotten better at hiding them. He’s not so sure about the sudden warmth at the nape of his own neck, either.

“I thought you were broke,” he challenges flatly, nodding his chin at the pyramid of danishes and crooked croissants.

“Penniless,” Sylvain agrees with a grin. “But not for long. You are looking at Fhirdiad’s newest, and dare I say most handsome, barista!” He spreads open his arms as if the title is tattooed across his chest.

“You got a job?” Felix pauses from picking between the pastries to stare at him incredulously. Sylvain’s grin grows ever larger. Of course he did, Felix can’t help but think: Sylvain is the only man he’s ever met who’s both an irredeemable disaster and irresistible in every regard.

“Guilty as charged.”

“So go to a hotel,” Felix quickly counters. Sylvain’s grin falters for a moment before he catches it and fixes it upright. 

“Well, yes, eventually. But I’m still two weeks and a paycheck away from big dreams like that. I did a little research, as it so happens, and turns out that the cost of living in Fhirdiad is a little richer than I remembered.”

“That’s because you were rich when you were here last,” Felix drawls.

“Yeah,” Sylvain laughs, “that’s probably part of it. So listen. I was thinking, what if I were to—”

“No.”

“— to stay here for just a little longer, and then maybe after that I could pay you for—”

“No, Sylvain.”

“— just think of it as a sublet, Felix. Of your very generously appointed couch. Maybe your bathroom, sometimes, although I’m open to negotiation.”

Felix turns to one of the croissants for support. It offers nothing, and so he plucks it from the pile and takes a spiteful bite.

“You’re not paying me rent,” he orders finally, trudging forward to hunt out something to drink. He casts a surreptitious glance at the orange juice, and is relieved to find that the beer squirreled behind it appears untouched from the night before.

“I have to pay you rent,” Sylvain argues from beyond the fridge door.

“I don’t need your money.”

“I know that, Felix, but it’s the principle of the thing.”

“I don’t need your principles, either.” Felix closes the door. Sylvain stares back at him, seemingly startled by the loss of a barrier between them. “Just...” Felix sighs, kneading the bridge of his nose with one hand and waving the half-eaten croissant with the other. “What are your hours?”

“Six to noon on weekdays, seven to two on Saturday,” he reports. He looks so pleased with himself that Felix loses the nerve to remind him that he has a J.D. from the best law school in Fodlan.

“Breakfast,” Felix replies tartly. Sylvain cocks his head at him, confused. “It was good.”

“Aw, good.” Sylvain’s lips spread into a boyish grin, all teeth. He still has each of them, Felix notes to himself. That seems like a good sign. Another point to Ingrid. “Thanks, Felix. I’m glad you liked it.”

“That isn’t— I hate cooking. I don’t have time for it. No rent,” he repeats before Sylvain has the chance to intervene, “but if you help with breakfast and dinner, you can sleep on the couch.”

“Really? You’ve got a deal! And here I was thinking that you’d be a much more brutal negotiator,” Sylvain laughs, jutting out a hand as if they’ve just closed on something monumental requiring a proper handshake. Felix ignores it to shoulder past him and takes a seat at the bar. Sylvain takes his rebuff in stride, leaning forward to snatch a danish from the baked bounty before standing across from him with the bulk of the sink standing guard.

“There are rules,” Felix decides to add, because he isn’t stupid. “No guests. I mean it, Sylvain.”

“No guests,” Sylvain promises around a mouthful of peach jam.

“And no late nights.”

“I’ll behave. I promise.”

Felix eyes him warily. This is not the first promise of this sort that Sylvain has made. Sylvain seems to read his hesitation well. A grim, serious look skips across his features before he chases it away with another grin.

“Listen, you don’t need a contract. Just say the word and I’m out. No contingencies. I understand. I know you weren’t looking for a roommate. I— I really appreciate it, Felix.”

“Fine,” Felix manages, uninterested in floundering in praise twice in the same day. He chews his croissant morosely and tries not to fixate on the massive grenade that he’s thrown into the middle of his tidy, well-arranged life.

“Hey,” Sylvain interrupts. “I’ve heard a couple rumors, by the way. Can I test them out?” Felix musters his most venomous stare. Sylvain hunches his shoulders against it, still grinning like a little boy caught hiding a frog in his crush’s knapsack.

“Fine,” Felix snarls again.

“Is Ingrid living here in the city, too?”

Well, good. Felix can manage this question. If he’s going overboard, he might as well drag Ingrid with him, too. “Yes. She lives uptown.” He mulls over what makes the most sense to reveal, and settles on: “She knows you’re here. I can give you her number.”

Sylvain’s face fills with an interesting mix of pleased cheer and utter dread. “I...uh, do you think she’d want to hear from me? We didn’t exactly part on great terms.”

“You fucked us all over equally when you decided to disappear,” Felix answers. Sylvain melts slightly under his lack of diplomacy, but he makes a good show of holding his ground. 

“Right.”

They both skirt expertly around the chasm as of yet left unaddressed between them. The sink seems silly in comparison, but Felix still settles his gaze on the drain.

“You should reach out to her,” Felix adds. “But only if you think you can do it properly.”

Sylvain nods.

“Is that it?” If Felix is going to play twenty questions with him, he wants to get it over with as quickly as possible.

“No one’s died, have they?” Sylvain asks, burying the severity of the question under another throwaway laugh.

“No.” Felix doesn’t add that Sylvain is the one they’re always looking for in obituaries and gruesome news reports.

“Any wedding bells? Kids?”

Felix scoffs. “Out of everything, is this really what you want to talk about?”

“What else is there?” Sylvain counters with a shrug. Felix isn’t convinced if he has a point or not.

“Dedue and Ashe,” he grunts, unsuited for the task of waxing poetic about much of anything, let alone matrimony. Sylvain was always better at that sort of thing. He grins, as if to prove the point.

“I called that one, you know.”

“It was a lucky guess.”

“I don’t do anything by luck, Felix. It’s _deductive reasoning_.”

Felix rolls his eyes. He’s not going to argue with Sylvain about luck, of course. If anything, he’s the most profoundly unlucky man he’s ever met. Still, he isn’t eager to reward Sylvain’s reasoning skills, either, or even lack thereof.

“What about Ferdinand and that gloomy bastard from the south?”

“Yes, them too,” Felix sighs, admitting that perhaps Sylvain’s intuition was better than he’d first thought.

“Two for two.” Sylvain celebrates with a wink, Felix with yet another roll of his eyes.

“Well, that’s all of them.”

“Ingrid still hasn’t met anyone special?”

“I don’t think she’s interested.” Felix pauses. “Don’t tell her I said that.”

“This is a safe space, Felix,” Sylvain promises. It sounds as thought he means it, although it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Ingrid’s romantic preferences. “Is she alright? Still working at that tech firm?”

“A different one. It’s the same thing. I don’t know. Cyber security, or something. We don’t really talk about it.”

“What do you talk about?”

“You,” Felix decides to unveil. He would have sidestepped it seven years before, but what’s the fucking point? If Sylvain is going to sleep on his couch and piss in his toilet, they might as well be honest with one another. The ruddiness in Sylvain’s cheeks turns grey.

“That makes sense,” he mutters.

“What are you doing here, Sylvain?”

“I told you. Turning over a fresh leaf.”

Felix stands and plants his elbows against the bar to lurch closer towards him. Sylvain smells like familiar shampoo and stolen toothpaste. “You’ve never been good at lying.”

“I’m great at lying,” Sylvain argues, smiling in a slimy, self-hating way. Felix despises it. He knows it well— better than anyone, maybe, other than Sylvain’s despicable excuse for a father. It makes the croissant in his stomach turn into concrete. “Just not with you.”

“So don’t waste my time.”

Sylvain falters. Felix can see it in his eyes. For a minute he’s a fawn instead of a bear, trembling on unsteady legs while he tries to gauge how fast he can run.

“I don’t know,” he sighs finally, glancing away under Felix’s gaze. “I had to leave, starting walking, and found myself here.”

“How?” Every bitter old cog in Felix’s brain shakes itself free from dust and starts turning again. “You didn’t bother to answer my calls for years. How the hell did you find my address?”

Sylvain combs a hand through his hair. It slicks against his skull, making him look even more newborn. “I asked for it.”

“You asked for it.”

“What do you want me to say?” Sylvain waves his hands at him, less white flags now than they are red banners taunting Felix on. “I didn’t stalk you, Felix. I just asked.”

“Asked who?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Mercedes,” Felix realizes aloud. It has to be. She was always too soft on Sylvain, even when they begged her not to be. Sylvain cringes guiltily at the name. “Shit. Are you serious?” Felix slips his phone from his pocket, scrolling through his contacts with a vengeful swipe of his thumb.

“Hey. Felix. Come on. Don’t drag her into this. She didn’t— _Felix_.”

He lurches forward and snatches the phone from Felix’s fingers. For some childish reason, that’s what makes Felix snap. The cogs are whirring and spinning inside him now, purring as fast as they’d run the last time Sylvain had been the central fixture in his godforsaken life. One minute he’s sitting on the barstool, and in the next he’s halfway up the bar, his fingers dug into Sylvain’s collar as he makes an honest attempt at dragging him over the counter. 

“Don’t fucking _touch_ me!” Felix snarls. “Don’t come into my fucking house and tell me what to do!”

“Okay!” Sylvain stutters, all wide, white eyes and crooked brows. “You’re right, Felix. I’m sorry.”

“You’re _sorry_?” He shoves his fists forward. Sylvain doesn’t account for seven years of boxing lessons when he braces against the push. He stumbles backwards, clubbing his shoulders into the far wall before he has the chance to fall. The noise is a bellows to the furnace crackling in Felix’s chest. “I thought you were dead! I went to the fucking _morgue_ , Sylvain! And meanwhile you were sharing life updates with _Mercedes_? Are you _joking_? Is that supposed to be another one of your little mistakes?”

“No, it was never—”

“Shut up!” Felix staggers away, unsure of where to put his feet where they won’t feel like he has to run. He’s already breathing hard enough to have just finished a marathon. “Shut the fuck up for once in your fucking... _Fuck!_ ”

His neighbors are going to call the cops. They probably think he’s about to murder someone. _That grim man in all the black and grey_ , they’ll say, _there was always something off about him_ , and who’s he to tell them that they’re wrong?

“Just... stay here,” he hisses. Sylvain stares back at him wordlessly, still splayed against the kitchen wall. “Stay here, in this room, and don’t go anywhere, because I don’t want to have to worry about _killing you_ again when you run off to punish yourself for being a fucking asshole. Alright?”

“Felix...”

“Don’t. I don’t want an apology. I don’t want an excuse. Tell me that you understand.”

Sylvain straightens. “I understand.”

Felix nods. Good enough. He can’t stand looking at him anymore— not the way that his Cheshire mask has broken to show off what he usually keeps hidden. It’s too much. Felix didn’t have any goddamned time. No warning. Seven years. Eighty-four months. Two thousand, five hundred and fifty-five days, and not a single one of them to turn a moment like this into words that aren’t made from tar and bile. He spins on his heel and stalks into his room. This time he slams the door.

* * *

Felix lays in bed for seven hours and thirteen minutes. He doesn’t sleep. He listens to the pad of Sylvain’s feet; the creak of the couch when he sits; the wail of four ambulances when they tear down the street outside. Even after Ingrid had finally starting hearing rumors about Sylvain again, Felix always thought about him when he heard a siren. Statistically speaking, one day he’d be the reason for it. Felix has never been sure if he’s praying for it to never happen, or if he just wants to get it over with.

He stares at the ceiling for thirty-seven more minutes before he finally gives up and slips from the bed. He paces the length of his room twice before he pulls on a shirt and creaks open his door. The living room is dark. There’s a lump on the couch, suspiciously human-shaped. For a minute Felix can’t help but wonder if it’s a ghost. He glances over to the bar next. One of the stools had toppled over during their scuffle, but it’s been put upright again. There’s the slight glimmer of cellophane wrapped around the plate of forgotten pastries. Felix creeps closer and recognizes the rounds of Sylvain’s contact case at the nearest end table. A pair of glasses sits folded beside it. They’re different from the ones he remembers, thicker rimmed. He wonders what happened to the old ones.

It lures him closer. Sylvain is asleep. Felix watches with held breath until he can see the rise and fall of the woolen blanket tossed over his chest. He steps closer, rolling slowly from toe to heel so that he doesn’t make a sound. It’s still Sylvain. No one’s broken his nose or gouged out his eyes, or cut off his ears for some sort of fucked up trophy. He looks a little older but so does Felix, really. In that silver light, it would be easy enough to invent a different life for him to have lived in their seven years torn apart.

Felix huffs under his breath. Torn apart. What the hell is he thinking? The only one doing the tearing had been Sylvain when he’d decided to skip town, chasing the end of one bender with the snout of the next one gripped between his hands. Stupid. If Felix isn’t careful, he’s going to be the only one torn up again.

He turns, finally exhausted. Five fingers catch at his wrist, warm and light enough to be cast off with the slightest pull of his arm. He freezes.

“Hey,” Sylvain whisperers. Felix spins again to look down at him. Sylvain blinks upwards, bleary-eyed. There’s a sad little shape on his lips. “Cantaloupe.”

“Fuck you,” Felix hisses. That stupid fucking word. Half of him can’t believe that he remembers it. They’d laughed for days when they’d first picked it out, but it’d turned sacrosanct when Sylvain had first invoked it after Miklan had shoved him out of the family sedan just when his father had merged onto the highway. _Truce_ , it means. _No matter what._

It isn’t fair. _No matter what_ means something different when you’re twelve years old.

“Sorry,” Sylvain adds. Felix grinds his teeth and lets his knees buckle until he’s crouched on the floor beside him.

“Sometimes I really hate you, Sylvain.” He tips forward to rest his forehead in the scratchy valley between Sylvain’s shoulder and the side of his chest.

“I know.”

Felix can feel the rumble of his voice better than he can hear it. The warmth of his hand cups against the back of his head, ghosting until Felix makes it clear that he won’t pull away. Then he cards his fingers through his hair, slow and familiar, somehow.

“I missed you,” Sylvain breathes. “I missed you so much.”

Felix squeezes his eyes shut. 

Sylvain has thirty-three freckles on his face. Felix doesn’t have to look at them to know that they’re there. He has two scars on the lobe of his right ear from a short-lived pair of earrings. He once beat Felix in a competition by completing one hundred and three pushups in a row. He was the undefeated _Galaga_ champion of Garreg Mach Academy, with a high score of eight million, six hundred thousand, one hundred fifty points, and placed in the ninetieth percentile on the Bar. He swallowed thirty aspirin at seventeen, and twenty-three more at twenty-one. He spent seven hours and twenty-two minutes on the phone with Felix the night after Glenn died. As far as Felix knows, he’s been resuscitated twice.

It takes Felix five years and ten months to learn how to hate Sylvain, and twenty-nine hours to forgive him.


	2. Anemone

“You look exhausted,” says Annette.

Felix thinks she’s being generous. He can feel the bags under his eyes.

“I’m fine.”

 _“In order to migrate the data we’re looking for,”_ the voice floating from their muted teleconference suggests, _“uh, first we’ll need to flag all accounts with duplicate records. So, uh, if you click here, you’ll find an option to filter by account number.”_

Felix stomach rumbles in reply. He glances over at Annette, who graciously focuses on sketching an illegible set of notes recording hour two of their tortuous call. Rodrigue has decided to invest in a new database for the firm, and Felix and Annette have been unlucky enough to have drawn the short straw in spearheading the initiative. It’s not like it’s a surprise. Felix keeps the ship running. He doesn’t have a job description, but if he did, it would be that. Annette, once a star consultant burned out by too many all-nighters, is Rodrigue’s indispensable assistant, and so she plays a key part in keeping them afloat, too. It’s never been glamorous. Still, maybe Felix would’ve rethought that sports scholarship if he’d known just how many hours he’d spend glassy-eyed in front of a cheap plastic desk phone set to speaker and promptly ignored.

“Do you mind if I eat my lunch?”

“Of course not!” Annette peeps cheerily. She sets aside her pen and rummages through her things, bending up again with a pink and yellow polka-dotted lunch bag brandished victoriously in hand. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

Felix tosses his own brown paper bag onto the desk and folds open the crumpled top.

 _“Remember to keep this field toggled to ‘maintain record’ whenever you get to this screen,”_ the speakerphone chides. Felix reaches into the bag. He wasn’t the one to pack it this morning, of course. Who the hell knows what’s inside. Cigarette butts and broken glass, if Sylvain’s usual diet is anything to go off of. It’s honestly a testament to Felix’s burgeoning maturity that he didn’t simply throw the thing out as soon as he stomped down into the street that morning. Lunch wasn’t part of their deal, after all. What the hell. His stomach grumbles and gurgles.

“Ooh,” Annette croons. “Yummy!”

It’s not _yummy_. It’s ridiculous. The brown paper bag has been replaced with six smaller plastic baggies. There’s two slices of bread in one; lettuce in the other, and a tomato in the third, ostensibly to keep the bread from getting soggy; two crisp strips of bacon in the fourth, which explains why the kitchen had smelled so good that morning, even though Felix had been too tired to manage anything more than a cup of coffee; plump green grapes, which he doesn’t remember buying, in the fifth; multicolored peppers in the final sixth, all cut into chunky matchsticks, as if he’s still in fucking grade school, not that the paper bag wasn’t offensive enough.

 _Shit_ , he predicts, and then, just as feared, Annette asks slyly, “Felix... Are you seeing someone?”

“No.” He snatches the bread and glumly assembles his BLT.

“Huh.” Annette twirls her fork into a strange collection of vegetables masquerading as pasta extricated from her own insufferably colorful bag.

_“...and next we’ll want to move the copies that we’ve made before into this partitioned section. Remember that any accounts made before last year need to be updated to the new date format.”_

“I always thought you were more of a ‘bag of chips, old banana’ kind of guy,” Annette observes.

“What?” Felix decides to omit _the hell are you talking about_ from his question. Annette is sweet. He tries his best to bite his tongue around her, although he’s starting to get the feeling that she’s more conniving than she looks.

“It good to see you eating real food,” she answers with an innocent smile. Her brows raise slightly as she studies her own lunch again, spinning that fork of hers as though it’s a magic wand. “You’re good with someone, too, you know. Not that it’s any of my business...”

“It isn’t,” Felix agrees tersely.

“...just that I think you even used to say _good morning_ to me, sometimes, with that last one. Now you just,” she furrows her brow and paints on a puckered scowl, “grunt and drink all of the coffee.”

Her impression isn’t very convincing. Felix rolls his eyes. “I don’t grunt.”

“You do. You definitely do.” She grins. Felix is reminded of the pleased house cats who’re always on TV, singing songs about kitty litter during the commercials.

“Pay attention to Frank,” he orders, gesturing at the neglected speakerphone. Annette spins another flourish of her fork.

“What was his name? The one who always drove you to work. He was so handsome.”

“You want his number?” Felix takes a toothy bite of his sandwich. It’s delicious. That doesn’t make any goddamned sense, since it’s just three fucking ingredients, but there you go. “You might not be his type.”

“Was that a _joke_?”

Felix’s phone rings. He becomes marginally more convinced of the notion of divine intervention. The idea quickly fades when he sees _Ingrid Galatea_ flash across the screen, followed after by _video call_. He can barely manage an interrogation by Annette, but adding Ingrid to the mix will make things absolutely untenable. He reaches to swipe the call into ignored purgatory. Divine intervention strikes again. His thumb brushes against _accept_.

Ingrid’s face fills the screen. It’s red-flushed and teary-eyed. Felix snaps to his feet. His blood is instant ice water.

“Sorry,” he says to Annette and the forgotten speakerphone, quickly amended with “hold on,” snapped at Ingrid.

“Is everything okay?” Annette calls after him as he rushes out into the hall. He doesn’t answer. The projector inside his head is already sputtering to life. He sees the black suit stood at perpetual attention in the far corner of his closet— the letters he’s never had the guts to burn—the irony of the thirst to get irreparably fucked up, vertigo and stomach acid.

“What happened?” he manages, finding the brace of the hallway wall against his shoulders.

“Sylvain,” Ingrid sniffs. A high pitched buzz fills Felix’s ears. Of course. This is how it always happens, right? Cruel and unusual punishment?

“He looks so good,” Ingrid continues with a shaky fit of laughter. Felix’s breath rips out of his lungs like a train shooting out of a tunnel. 

“...what?”

Ingrid drags the back of her hand against her nose and shakes her head. “I just got lunch with him. Oh my god, Felix. I wish you would’ve said something. I broke down in the middle of Piero’s, of all places. It was like seeing a ghost.”

“Ingrid,” Felix groans, shoving his thumb against his crumbled brow, “I thought you were calling to tell me that he’s _dead_.”

“Oh my god,” Ingrid echoes. “Shit.” She gasps another rueful laugh and tilts the phone closer. “I’m so sorry. Yeah, that makes sense.”

Felix knocks his head against the wall and stares into the ceiling tiles, breathing out a _fuck_ that no one likely hears.

“Still,” Ingrid endeavors on from below, “you failed to mention that he’s been clean for _two years_ when you said he wasn’t a total disaster.”

“What?”

“Oh my _god_ , Felix,” she invokes for a third time, making him think about the divine again. “Of course you didn’t even ask him. You’re both impossible.”

“You shouldn’t believe a word he says,” Felix snaps back, eyes darting back to his phone, wounded.

“Listen, normally I would agree. I definitely get it. But this time? Lunch was like a time machine. And he told me he already got a job?”

“It’s just some shitty hourly gig.”

“Oh, right. I forgot that you’re such an uber capitalist,” Ingrid drawls dryly. Maybe he deserves that one. He sighs and gives another over-hard rub of his thumb against his temple.

“Look, Ingrid. I’m at work. I’ve got to go.”

“No! Wait. I called you for a reason,” Ingrid insists from underneath the looming press of Felix’s fingers. “I mentioned Sylvain to Ashe and Mercie, and word sort of...spread. I thought maybe we could organize something. You know, a get-together. Next weekend. Your place,” she quickly adds, as if he won’t notice the intrusion until they’re all cramped together in his living room. “You get a week to prepare for it, dummy, so don’t say no.”

“You want to throw a party for a _junkie_?”

“Don’t say stuff like that,” Ingrid quickly counters. “God. You’re such an asshole, you know that? He can’t just stay crammed in your apartment all of the time with neither of you saying anything to each other. He needs stuff like this.”

“He’s not a dog. I don’t need to socialize him.”

“It’s just dinner,” Ingrid insists. He knows this tone. There’s no hope in defeating her. His shoulders slump. “A potluck, how about that? I’ll tell Ashe to bring that curry you like. You don’t even need to leave your room. Just sit in there and sweat by yourself. We’re gonna do it, Felix. We’ve got to reward good behavior.”

“He isn’t a dog,” Felix attempts again, this time hopelessly.

“Good boy,” Ingrid answers. Her weepiness is long gone. She gives him a triumphant smile before the screen is swept with call ended.

“Shit,” Felix sighs. He presses his palms against his face. From beyond the thin wall he’s propped against, he can hear a muted voice. _And that’s it,_ poor Frank reveals from the speakerphone. _New and improved and ready to go._

* * *

Felix takes a half day on Friday. It’ll piss Rodrigue off, but most everything he does pisses Rodrigue off. _Cut your hair,_ he says, and so of course Felix has grown it so long it nearly reaches his ass; _settle down_ , and afterwards Felix trolls the shittiest bars in Fhirdiad for a long and physically exhausting year. In comparison, playing hooky almost seems like a compromise. He grabs the spare gym bag from the bottom drawer of his desk and takes the twelve minute bus ride to the gym. He and Caspar, his sparring partner, pummel each other until they can’t throw a punch without wobbling like Tuesday-morning malt-liquor-drunks. 

The shower afterwards in the gym’s shitty locker room feels like a baptism. He rides the train home in a foggy daze. It’s the best he’s felt in days. He’s not grinding his teeth or picking at his cuticles, or counting down the seconds until he gets the inevitable call that Sylvain has looted everything of value from his apartment to snort through his nose. He’s not even thinking about the train, really— just lets his muscle memory take over while his subconscious keeps track of the peeling advertisements above the platforms arranged between the gym and home. When he spots a graffitied toothpaste ad he knows to stand and slink through the sliding doors. It’s snowing on the streets above. Damned Ingrid. She always seems to know just about everything.

Felix drowses for two hundred twenty-three more blissful steps. Then he has the immeasurable misfortune of opening his door. A broad, familiar back is waiting there to greet him, paired with an unmistakeable head of golden hair.

“Felix,” Dimitri startles, turning. The genuine smile stretched across his lips grows brittle and pitifully feigned. Felix’s eyes dart from Dimitri to a cardboard box left like a sacrifice on the living room coffee table and then upwards to Sylvain, stretched across the couch like he’s lived there forever, topped with a confused little grin that looks like it’s about to transform into an empathetic smile. Yep, there it goes. Shit. He’s always been too clever for his own good. Felix is suddenly desperate to disappear.

“Hello, Dimitri,” he manages thinly, shutting the door behind him. “What a surprise.”

“Yes,” Dimitri answers. He clears his throat and grips at the glass of water in his hands. So Sylvain has bad habits with good manners, too. Maybe they’re less good when they mean stealing from your landlord’s cupboards. “I... Of course, I was under the impression that you would be away at this hour. I only came by to drop off a few... what you loaned me. I wasn’t aware that Sylvain was in town.” His voice warms. Felix recognizes the bashful wonder from Ingrid’s teary phone call. God damn it. This was always the problem. They all love Sylvain, if each in their own pitiful ways.

Dimitri steps forward to place his glass on the bar. “But I was just leaving. It was wonderful to catch up, Sylvain,” he adds, dipping his head at Sylvain as if he’s holding court from the sectional.

“You too, Dima. Call me if you were serious about that pick-up game.”

“Of course. Next week. It’s decided.” Dimitri winds the unfurled scarf around his shoulders tight again and makes a beeline for the pair of black boots waiting patiently near the door. Felix steps aside to let him past and does his best not to recognize his cologne.

“You look well,” Dimitri says under his breath while he slips in his first foot. Felix tuts a sharp breath through his teeth. Dimitri has always been a miserable liar. Felix’s hair is still wet from the showers, and must be frizzed and wild in the places where the winter wind has dried it. He’s not yet taken off his jacket, so Dimitri can’t see that he’s dressed in the old, crumpled shirt he’d found folded at the bottom of his gym bag, but that doesn’t mean that any part of him looks well.

Felix’s gaze slips to the box again. He can see the sleeves of a few familiar shirts peeking from the top, along with odds and ends like two records and a hat and, most damningly, a toothbrush. Fuck. Why didn’t he just throw away the _fucking toothbrush_?

Dimitri clears his throat. Felix snaps his attention back to him, and feels his soul leak through his shoes when he realizes that he’s holding something out for him. A key. _His_ key, more specifically, and the last spare he has now that he’s given one to Sylvain, too.

He snatches it without a word and shoves it into his pocket. Dimitri frowns slightly and shifts on his feet before fiddling with the buttons of his recently donned jacket and turning for the door.

“Well then. Goodbye.”

He’s lucky that Felix waits until he’s in the hall before he slams the door.

Felix ignores Sylvain while he slips out of his outerwear. He strings his jacket on a hook and kicks his slush-damp shoes aside. The gym bag is tossed with no lack of spite into the nearest corner. He huffs a hot breath into his freezing fingers and stalks towards the cardboard box, willing all of his anger into his eyes in an attempt to broadcast that Sylvain better not say a damned thing until he’s tossed the whole fucking collection through the window.

“So,” Sylvain mulls, “Dimitri.”

Felix grabs the box and storms towards his room. He swings open the door and tosses it through with a loud bang. It’s very tempting to follow in the box’s trajectory, but the problem with that strategy is that eventually he’ll have to come out again, and no doubt Sylvain will still be sitting in that very spot, with that very grin on his lips, waiting. A renewed vigor for punching things fills up every inch of Felix’s chest.

“Shut up.”

Sylvain flashes his palms at him. “I was just minding my own business. I promise.”

Felix huffs. He stomps into the kitchen and stares into the neutral zone of the fridge. The beer’s still all there, hidden behind its OJ sentinel. He grabs the pitcher of water and yanks it from the shelf, sloshing it into a glass to stop himself from speaking. It feels like he’s swallowing mud when he takes a drink.

Sylvain hums and spins the tv remote between his fingers. “How long did that go on for?”

“It’s none of your fucking business.” Felix can nearly hear the crackle of his mood as it catches fire. Sylvain stretches his long limbs and sprawls further across the couch, like quicksilver spilling from a broken thermometer.

“I always thought he was a little in love with you.”

Felix sees white. He tests the weight of his glass in his hand and considers aiming for Sylvain’s head. Maybe, a half decade ago, he would’ve done it. Now, however, he’s different, as disappointing as that sometimes seems to be. He pays his taxes. He owns his own home. He’s started to take vitamins.

“Ingrid says she wants to throw you a welcome party,” he forces through his teeth. Takes another drink. Sylvain cocks one of his brows. Good. At least the pivot knocks him off his feet, too.

“A welcome party?”

“Next weekend. She wants to play house.” Felix sips another mouthful of cold water to quench the embers broiling at the back of his throat. “It means a lot to her.”

Sylvain nods. He knows Ingrid as well as Felix does, of course. Not even seven years of methadone could poison that out of him. When things mean something to Ingrid, they do them, no matter what. “Sure. That’s really nice of her.”

Felix feels the weight of his workout dragging against his shoulders. He admits defeat, and slowly pads around the jut of the bar to take a seat at the far end of the couch. Sylvain drags back his legs slightly to give him more room. They both play another act from the magic show they’ve been performing since Sylvain first arrived: not saying the things that they should say, speaking in code when they do. Silence, mostly. Maybe it should be exhausting.

Sylvain is the first to break. He huffs a sad little sound through his nose and slumps into the corner of the sectional, fingers suddenly splayed over his face to smash his freckles out of order.

“Shit,” he sighs.

Felix feels his stomach lurch. “What?” He stares at Sylvain’s knuckles. Even without reading his face, he knows that he’s feeling guilty and guilt, as far as Sylvain’s concerned, is a warhead primed and designed for mutual destruction. “What did you do?”

Sylvain crooks two fingers apart and peeks at Felix through the gap. “I’m so fucking jealous,” he mumbles.

“It’s a party for _you_ ,” Felix replies incredulously. Sylvain laughs, and then he groans, rubbing his fingertips against his eyes.

“No, not that.” He drags his hands through his hair and grips backwards at the couch cushions, desperate to manhandle something in order to feel less pitiful, it seems. His head bobs with a dejected tilt in Felix’s direction. “Dimitri.”

“You’re joking.”

“He seemed really broken up about it.”

“Shut up,” Felix snaps, stiffening defensively, like a tomcat cornered by a broom. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“So tell me about it.”

Sylvain is shoving a dagger into Felix’s hand. He can feel the hilt against his palm. _Cut me open_ , those baleful eyes of his command. Felix thinks about the mundane again. He goes to Rodrigue’s for the holidays— has done so for the past five years. If he can forgive his father’s horrible eulogy for Glenn, he can forgive anything. He’s not some shitty, angry kid anymore. But god, sometimes he hates it. Not being able to lash out. Not being able to flail, not even when he feels the walls closing in on him. He grips the dagger and pushes its point between Sylvain’s ribs, presented sacrificial, like a bleeding lamb.

“We were together for two years,” he reveals. His teeth feel sharp against his tongue. Sylvain winces. It’s satisfying. “It got too serious.”

“How serious?” Sylvain can’t help himself. Of course he can’t. Felix twists a cruel wrist.

“He asked me to marry him.”

“Shit.” Sylvain picks at a seam in the couch cushion. “Why’d you back out?”

It’s an obvious riposte. Felix should’ve been prepared. Instead he fumbles. His answers drape across the room in a chiffon made from old ghosts. Dimitri in his kitchen, cooking, the way Sylvain does; Dimitri in the hall, holding up a picture frame while Felix bosses him until its properly hung; Dimitri sitting beside him under that woolen blanket now folded neatly atop the ottoman, cast in the blue light of a foreign-language film that they’d both found difficult to follow; giant, golden, calm. Just like Felix, life has domesticated him. They aren’t little boys anymore, swinging their tiny fists against the obituaries papering their gilded cages.

Dimitri tells him that he loves him. He apologizes for the way things were. He kisses Felix’s palms and holds him, sweaty and exhausted, back to chest, knees nocked. _I love you_ , and he means it. When he speaks, Felix hears a boy’s voice echoing against the mildewed walls of an old, dilapidated well. _I adore you_ , and in each syllable, the shadow of dry-heaving retches and _sorry-so-sorrys_. He remembers a starry night scented with cigarette smoke and tequila. _I’m in love with you_ , he’d said, and twenty-four hours later Sylvain had gone, leaving Felix behind with a sore throat and an abandonment complex that he’d never really figured out.

Shit. He can’t tell him that.

“It just didn’t work out.”

Sylvain studies him. He doesn’t look like he’s being led to an altar anymore. His eyes are predatory and wicked smart. Well, that’s him, isn’t it? That big, dumb animal that everyone ignores until they realize too late that he’s got a brain and an appetite and fangs?

“I get it,” Sylvain agrees. Felix scoffs and rolls his eyes.

“You don’t get anything. You haven’t been here for years — don’t know shit about me, or Dimitri. We’re not kids anymore.”

“You never wanted to be a kid,” Sylvain argues, tempering the words with a grin. “You grew up too fast for it, anyway.”

“So did you.” Felix mashes a throw pillow in an effort to stop himself from doing anything more drastic. “Both of you did.”

“Maybe. I guess I should say that I’m sorry,” Sylvain replies. Felix shrugs. He doesn’t want to fucking talk about it. “About Dimitri, that is.”

“Nobody died.” Between all of them, it’s not so unusual a reply. They’ve all got a few missing branches in their family trees, after all. Felix stands. Whatever. They’ve addressed the topic sufficiently well enough for him to never speak about it again. If Dimitri wants to bleed his whole heart out on Sylvain’s shoulder, he can knock himself out on his own time. “I have some work to do,” Felix adds, which really means that he’s going to hide in his bedroom until Sylvain gets distracted by dinner.

“Sure.” Apparently Sylvain has decided to be magnanimous enough not to call Felix on his bluff. Felix nearly makes it to his door before he clears his throat again. “Hey. Are you seeing anyone else?”

“What the fuck is it to you?”

“Let me take you out.”

Felix’s feet stutter over his next step. “No,” he answers instinctively. Sylvain laughs.

“Come on. A real date. My treat. It’ll be nice.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to. Even if you don’t like the company, you’ll get a good meal out of it.”

“You’re broke,” Felix reminds him sharply. Sylvain shrugs.

“I’m not entirely broke. Just think of it like groceries, but better.”

Felix wheels back towards him with sudden and murderous intent. “I’m not going to get you off just because you bought me dinner.”

“That’s not what this is at all,” Sylvain counters. He’s huddled behind the back of the couch. Felix realizes too late that he’s being exceptionally honest. He sucks in a breath and sighs.

“I’ll think about it.”

Sylvain lights up like a skyline recovering from an overlong blackout. Fuck it. Whatever. Felix retreats for the door. Blackouts make sense for Sylvain, anyways. The problem is that Felix isn’t really sure how to reconcile it. Who’s fault is it, really, when the power goes out? Is it all of that wasted electricity, or is it just those greedy users who sucked it all down?

* * *

Felix has been living with dread for years. Like most other familiar things, it’s lost most of its novelty. Dread curls up at the foot of his bed instead of keeping him up at night. It lurks in the shadows cast by the tall windows in his office, but it’s never enough to distract him. Maybe he’s even grown a little fond of it, in a strange sort of way, like how his muscles burn and ache after a good workout. 

So he doesn’t dread Sylvain’s party, or at least not in a way that slows the week that precedes it. Instead the six days til Saturday are a blur of meetings and emails and nights spent watching shitty sitcoms with Sylvain over home-cooked meals. In fact, when he wakes on Saturday morning Felix doesn’t remember the party at all. Sylvain doesn’t mention it when he greets him in the kitchen, busy stacking a tower of ridiculous blueberry pancakes. It’s not unusual for him to clean— he was always like that, even as a little kid, and Felix knows it’s not good, really, but what the hell is he going to do, he’s not a therapist, and if Sylvain wants to scour away his trauma with steel wool against the kitchen sink, so be it— and so Felix doesn’t think about houseguests when he catches Sylvain with a broom, either.

It’s not until Ingrid knocks at their door at four, armed with a casserole dish and a stack of plastic cups, that he remembers what’s about to happen in an all-at-once rush. Dread wakes from its spot in the far corner and twirls itself between his legs, purring like a house cat. Ingrid ignores whatever shocked look is on his face and shoves the casserole into his arms.

“Can you put this in the fridge and preheat the oven to three fifty?”

“Hey, Ingrid!”

“Hey, Sylvie,” Ingrid sings. She totters on one foot, pulling off her boots before skidding forward on wooly-socked feet to pull Sylvain into a hug. Felix skirts past them both to reluctantly follow Ingrid’s instructions. He tries not to think about how wrong it feels to watch Ingrid touch Sylvain so casually, when he and Sylvain both have been so careful to avoid it themselves. Not that he has any idea why they’ve both been so dedicated to the task. Maybe it’s better if he doesn’t pick an explanation.

Ashe and Dedue arrive promptly at seven o’clock. True to her word, Ingrid has successfully convinced Ashe to bring the biggest pot of curry that Felix has even seen. It bubbles and burbles on the stovetop, filling the apartment with mouthwatering spice that welcomes the rest of their guests at seven forty-five. Dimitri is the first, unfortunately for Felix, who had been so desperate that he’d arrive mixed somewhere in between. Luckily Dedue is there to distract him, and so Felix has an excuse to stay hidden in the kitchen despite a complete lack of culinary skill. Mercedes comes next, and then Ferdinand and Hubert, dressed in matching pea coats; and more of them, more noise, more smiles, more careful so-good-to-see-yous that nimbly overstep the reason why Sylvain’s been so hard to see for so long.

Felix scrapes along the bare minimum requirements of playing host for thirty excruciating minutes. Ten minutes later, and enough of the room is enthralled by Sylvain’s famous storytelling that Felix can escape with the turn of a doorknob into his spare room. The cool glow inside greets him like an oasis. He closes the door and slumps against the far wall to savor it.

He hadn’t always liked fish. He’d been too singleminded as a boy to care about pets. The Fraldariuses had owned a dog but, like everyone else, it’d preferred Glenn. The first to win Felix over had been a goldfish won at the state fair, and even then he’d only liked it because it’d been proof that he’d been the only one with a keen enough eye to pop all ten balloons at the dart game. Then he’d grown up, however, and he’d realized that in the big, celestial game of bullseye, he’d never really been the dart. That’s when he’d bought his first aquarium. Now he has four, each larger and more elaborate than the last.

The fish inside all mill about, zipping between swaying leaves and colorful heads of artificial coral, unmoved by their overwhelmed master. Felix watches them until his vision blurs into pleasant indifference. After Glenn had died, Rodrigue had employed a full retinue of psychologists and psychiatrists to soothe the wounds he left behind. As much as Felix had been keen to fight against the whole idea, in the end they’d succeeded in doing exactly what Rodrigue had paid them for. One of them had suggested meditation. He’d never mastered the trick of quieting his thoughts, but the aquariums have convinced him that it would’ve been good for him, if he’d ever really figured it out.

Sylvain’s laughter booms outside. It makes Felix think about him, naturally. His mind wanders among the usual suspects. Sylvain at ten, grinning, his mouth a checkerboard from a missing front tooth not yet replaced with a shiny new implant to make up for the one Miklan had knocked loose; Sylvain at fourteen at the stables, dressed like a miniature jockey, both impressive and comical, winking when he catches Felix staring; Sylvain at sixteen after school, in detention, heels crossed over his desk and his chair tipped back on two legs, laughing with the teacher, because he’d achieved that impossible balance of being a complete fuck-up and the top in class; Sylvain at nineteen, a college freshman home for the holidays, boastful and swaggering as he tells tall tales to Ingrid and Dimitri about Greek life, and somehow only Felix sees the ways he’s already started to change, how the puffy, hungover look of reckless teenage drinking has morphed into something meaner.

Sylvain at twenty-four and Felix at twenty-two. The world is a blur. Felix hasn’t yet relented to his father’s endless job offers. He’s stuck toiling at the lowest rung on the totem pole at some shitty accounting firm instead. Sylvain, recently lauded as one of the youngest graduates of his perfect doctoral program, makes him feel stupid. Even as a grotesque homunculus made from cocaine and oxycontin, he’s doing something with his life. Every law firm with a reputation is vying for his attention and he, in classic Sylvain fashion, has selected some bleeding-heart pro bono operation in bumfuck nowhere, Kleiman.

Sylvain tells him the details with great silver puffs of cigarette smoke. They’re sitting on the trunk of his car in the middle of the endless, empty acreage circling the Gautier estate. No one goes out there, or at least no one without a death wish. They won’t be chided when Sylvain drives his dented Bimmer across the front lawn after they finish draining the bottle of too-expensive tequila that they’re so busy sharing between them. Felix watches him while he speaks, but he doesn’t really listen. Sylvain is spellbinding in the dark. Felix realizes, suddenly and with horrible finality, that he’s staring at a dying star.

“I’m in love with you,” Felix blurts. Sylvain chokes on his slurring diatribe about suffrage and stares at him with wide, white eyes. “I’m in love with you,” he says again, because Sylvain is leaving soon, and he’s shining so bright that Felix is convinced that he’s in full-blown supernova. 

Sylvain kisses him. He tastes sweet and smoky. Their palms squeak against the trunk as they grope at each other. Sylvain’s forgotten cigarette burns the ends of Felix’s upswept hair. He can smell the stench of it even when they’re sprawled across the grass. It’s not a night that stands up well to storytelling. Felix is too wasted to get hard. Sylvain isn’t. Felix gives him sloppy, unpracticed head. Sylvain moans his name over and over, but even afterwards he doesn’t say anything more. The morning after, Felix wakes up alone in one of the countless Gautier guest bedrooms. The labyrinthine estate is empty except for staff and the minotaur of Felix’s outrageously horrible headache.

At first he thinks that he’s just a fool won over by Sylvain’s trompe l’oeil affection. That explains why Sylvain doesn’t answer his pathetic late afternoon call. Felix tell himself different versions of the same lie for two weeks afterwards, until it’s clear that Sylvain hasn’t just run, but disappeared. That’s when Felix turns and faces the truth. He was already too late. Fuck supernovas. Sylvain was just a black fucking hole.

“Felix?”

Felix jumps. His elbows knock against the wall as he turns to face the opening swing of the door. A head of shaggy red hair peeks through, followed after by a pair of widening eyes.

“Huh,” Sylvain adds, stepping inside and closing the door behind him to muffle the dinner party’s cheery bustle. “Well, this is a relief. I was worried there were bodies in here.”

Felix should jump to his feet, and snarl something mean, and shove Sylvain back outside. Instead he simply rolls his eyes against the inevitability of it all. Sylvain shoves his hands into his pockets and begins to trail the aquariums arranged along the perimeter of the room, humming with appreciation as he takes it all in.

“I like this guy,” Sylvain adds, pulling one of his hands free to tap against the glass. A bold clownfish follows the tip of his finger, fins flared.

Felix snorts. “That’s Sylvain,” he reveals. Sylvain turns on his heel. There’s a fresh grin pulling at his lips.

“Of course it is,” he laughs. He turns again to give the other Sylvain another tap. “He looks a little lonely. Should I take that personally?”

Felix eyes the empty, well-kept tank. “He eats them. The other fish.”

“Oh.” Sylvain steps back, hands falling limply at his side. He keeps on stepping until the wall brushes against his back, and then he sinks into his haunches at Felix’s side. “I feel like there’s a lot to unpack there.”

“It’s just a fish,” Felix lies. Sylvain laughs again. He settles into a sitting position, one knee bent, the other cocked lazily to the side. “You can’t run away from your own party.”

“Is that what you’re doing?” Sylvain counters with a raised brow. Felix scoffs.

“Be quiet, or I’ll tell them that you’re here.”

They stare at Sylvain in miniature as he darts between the pink nubs of a stony coral knot. Felix feels his heartbeat settle. He focuses on the steady in-and-out of Sylvain’s breathing. It’s like a pendulum swinging back and forth— the final act of their overindulgent magic show. Hypnotism, this time.

“Why’d you leave?” Felix asks. Sylvain the fish is startled by the sound of his voice. He slips behind the coral until only the black tips of his fins remain.

“I don’t know,” Sylvain replies quietly.

“Bullshit.”

Sylvain huffs a breath through his nose. His head knocks against the wall. “I don’t want to talk about this with you.”

“Why?” Felix bites back, his temper suddenly and irreparably stoked. “Fuck you, you don’t think you owe me that, at least?” He spreads his fingers over his kicking heartbeat. “Do you have any idea how it felt to have you fuck off like that, after— _fuck you_. You owe me an explanation.”

Sylvain flinches. “It’s not that simple.”

“Listen, Sylvain,” Felix snarls, “you’re not some enigma, alright? You’re just a coward with a death wish. You think I don’t know that?” He catches himself before he’s shouting and forces his voice down. “But I’m still here talking to you about this, and letting you live here, and everything else, because I care about you. So do the decent thing for once and tell me what the hell is going on.”

Sylvain fidgets and stares into the carpet. “It’s because of that,” he manages finally. “It’s because you care. Out of everybody, you were the only one who ever cared about anything that had to do with me.”

“Bullshit.” This time Felix’s nerves are rankled enough for him to turn on his knees and loom over Sylvain. Sylvain startles, seemingly unsure if he should shove him off or cower. “Ingrid cared. Dimitri cared. Dedue, Ashe. Mercedes. Shit, Rodrigue,” Felix continues, voice raising, nearly breathless, “fucking _Seteth_ , the headmaster, you remember? They all cared. You were their patron saint, and I had to be the one to tell them that you just fucked off, or died, or whatever the fuck it was you did. Don’t tell me it was because no one cared.”

“Well, I didn’t!” Sylvain roars. The party outside dulls for a moment, no doubt shocked by the sound. They both freeze until the conversation lulls into an awkward buzz once more. Sylvain drags his fingers through his hair and sighs. “I didn’t care about them,” he admits, quiet again. “They didn’t matter to me. They’re all just...people. There’s people everywhere. What difference does it make? But you...” He shakes his head. “I was a dead man walking, Felix, and I _liked_ it. This, all of this,” he pats his hands over his chest, across his arms, “this is just more Gautier bullshit, and I’ll do anything I can to mess up my old man’s things. Right? I don’t have to talk smart and do good to do that, and it’ll do a lot more for this world than whatever the fuck else I was doing. But I wasn’t...I couldn’t drag you down with me.”

He turns to catch Felix’s gaze. His eyes are empty in that frightening way of an abyss sprawled beneath the shallows just beyond a sunny beach. The aquariums burble in the silence his words leave behind. For the first time, really, fully, Felix realizes the cruel irony of everything. Him, here, shoving his life underwater, and Sylvain. Miklan had thrown him into that well on his thirteenth birthday. By the time Felix had stumbled upon it, Sylvain had been clinging to the slimy walls and treading water for nearly six hours. The filthy water he’d sucked into his lungs had turned into pneumonia, bad enough that he’d cracked a few ribs before they intubated him. It was inevitable—everything—but Felix knows that it accelerated it, at least, for him to have had his first real dose of swallowing things that made him feel better while they waited for the bones to mend.

“But you came back.”

Sylvain laughs ruefully. “Yeah. I came back.” He palms a hand over his face. “I went all the way down,” he explains slowly, his voice rumbling into a dispassionate baritone, “to the very bottom of everything, and it was...terrible. For the first time in my life I thought, what if this is it? What if I never feel anything but _this_ , ever again? And it felt so fucking unfair. Just misery, all the way to the bitter end. I want more than that, you know? Even if it’s just some tiny shred, whatever the hell it is that I still deserve, I just want something _good_.”

“You’re so selfish,” Felix groans. Sylvain stares at him, mouth slightly agape, stupefied. “All of that, and you can’t even apologize before you start talking about what you deserve?”

“This is an apology. This, until the end. Let me make up for what I’ve done.”

“Fuck, Sylvain,” Felix sighs. He rubs his eyes hard enough to see stars. Black holes. Whatever. “Why couldn’t you have just joined some twelve step program and found god instead?”

The weight of Sylvain’s head presses against Felix’s left shoulder. He rests his cheek against the crown, nose tickled by some of Sylvain’s tousled hair.

“Give me a chance,” Sylvain mumbles. All of the naked-nerved desperation from before has been stripped from his voice. He sounds tired, and small, and unsure. “I know I don’t deserve it, but I won’t fuck it up.”

Felix watches sideways as Sylvain the fish sneaks to the front of his tank. He trails off to the far corner, bobbing against the current as he watches the angelfish in the adjacent tank swim dreamy circles around a sunken spit of driftwood. _Don’t let me drown_ , Sylvain had sobbed, just an innocent little kid scrambling over slick handholds while Felix reached to catch him. _Please don’t let me drown._

“Fine,” Felix snaps. He feels Sylvain exhale. They both listen in silence to the room outside as the party celebrates the man who is, and was, and wasn’t there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up next: the final chapter, full of all of the drama that was supposed to be in this chapter before more drama got in the way.


	3. Love Song

Sylvain did not become Sylvain all on his own. Felix remembers their shared childhood well enough to speak with authority on the matter. The hallmarks of Sylvain as a boy are alien to the ones that followed him into adulthood. Remarkably, for instance, he’d been born shy. Some of Rodrigue’s first memories of the boy had been him hiding behind his mother’s legs, recounted to Felix only because he’d done nearly the same himself two years later.

Sylvain blossoms into extroversion between ages six and seven, thanks to the sunniness of his father’s affection. He’s too young at the time to understand that Ambrose’s favor is insidious. Felix could fill a photo album with Sylvain naive and under his father’s thumb, dressed in bespoke suits made in miniature of Ambrose’s own grim attire. His father’s men coo at him when he parrots Ambrose’s coarse language, and clap when he mimes his gestures, when he forms an L with his thumb and forefinger and lisps _blam-blam-blam!_ It’s funny, what kids pick up.

Sylvain is trusting. He makes friends with everyone, each as earnestly as the last. He loves animals: dogs, cats, squirrels, millipedes. Felix remembers a sparrow with a broken wing, kept like a treasure in a shoebox. Sylvain feeds the creature tiny worms pinched at the end of a pair of tweezers. Felix can’t decide if he should be amazed or jealous. Glenn chides them both, saying something about nature taking its course. Sylvain doesn’t listen to him, as much as he admires him. He spends all night building a brace for the bird out of tongue depressors and masking tape.

Miklan finds the sparrow and brings it to the table during a rare family breakfast. He crushes it beneath his heel. Ambrose roars at him, furious at the mess made of the Almyran rug spread across the floor. Someone comes into the room and drags Miklan away by the collar. Ambrose forces Sylvain to finish his breakfast while another man dressed in an impeccable suit arrives to kneel and pick out the gore from in between the carpet’s embroidered flowers.

The world keeps stepping on Sylvain. It starts with Ambrose and Miklan, but soon the circle grows. His broken bones heal into strange angles. He starts to throw himself under the crush. Felix loses track of who’s at fault. He convinces himself it’s a law of nature: gravity, fluid mechanics, and Sylvain. It doesn’t make it any easier when Felix finds himself breaking him.

And it’s certainly not the worst of everything that’s happened to them, working too late on a Friday night, but Felix still feels like an asshole. Neither of them needs to be courted. That’s never been part of their relationship, whatever the hell _relationship_ means. It doesn’t change the fact that Felix’s approval of their dinner plans and the anticipation of the six days stretched from when Sylvain had asked til now makes Sylvain _happy_. He hums with excitement when he cooks them breakfast, cutting heart-shaped holes in Felix’s toast and scribbling lewd syrup shapes over his hotcakes. Their neighbors must be sick of all the off-pitch ballads he sings while he showers. Felix watches as a second version of the man he’s come to know peeks out from beneath a crippled exoskeleton patchworked from the first. Shy, bright, trusting. Sylvain is handing him something precious in a shoebox. Felix is breaking it into pieces.

Or not.

Shit.

Maybe it’s nothing at all.

 _sorry_ , Felix types with clammy fingers, _i’m leaving now_. He shoves his fists through his coat sleeves and storms from his office, daring the bleary-eyed staff still hunched over their own computers to demand another minute of his time. The firm can disintegrate, for all he cares. Rodrigue doesn’t need the fucking money. Felix snarls at his watch face while the elevator slowly drags him down. Eight forty-three. Their reservations had been for seven thirty. Fuck.

His phone chimes. _OK,_ says Sylvain. The two letters are hardly a panacea for the guilt broiling in Felix’s gut. He bounces his knee on the train ride home, pushing so hard against the ball of his foot that he can feel the vibrations through his seat. He’s never been a well-rounded man. When he’d excelled at football, his academics had suffered. His undergraduate career had been underwhelming even after he’d traded in his aspirations on the pitch for something more sensible. His roommates had found him rude and messy. He’s never been good at making friends. The only reason he hasn’t been fired yet is because his father refuses to cast him aside. His relationships are poisonous. He’s the one who poisons them.

He can’t do this.

The revelation comes to him when the overhead lights flicker as the train clatters through a tunnel. Suddenly he understands what Sylvain meant about the fear of dragging someone else down. Not just someone, but _him_. **_Fuck_**. Felix taps nonsense into the open dialogue box glimmering against the screen of his phone. He wishes the string of consonants would form themselves into something good.

He settles on _i’m really sorry_. It looks flaccid and useless when it’s typed out. He decides to say it aloud instead. Maybe Sylvain will believe him. Maybe he’ll understand that it was just a shitty coincidence, and not Felix lifting up his foot to grind Sylvain back down. Felix jogs the distance between the subway stop and his apartment. _I’m really sorry,_ he coaches himself, over and over, each word dedicated to a step. _I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to disappoint you._

He swings open his apartment door and braces for impact. A melodic voice greets him first. It’s being piped into the room from the wedge-shaped speakers hung next to the television. Felix hears the tail end of a man’s deep, honey voice promising _even be glad just to be sad thinking of you_ , paired with a warbling trumpet and a swinging set of strings. The living room is cast in a moody glow improvised from a solitary strip of light sneaking through the half-open bathroom door. The air is perfumed with basil and rosemary, and the caramelized unctuousness of something savory. It makes Felix’s mouth water.

“Hey!” Sylvain turns the corner from the kitchen into Felix’s line of sight. “You’re here!”

Felix’s prophecy of a jilted lover disappears. Sylvain replaces it. He’s dressed in a crisp, collared shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, unbuttoned just enough at the throat to make him look rakish instead of claustrophobic. It’s tucked into a pair of dark slacks saved from an era when Sylvain was a walking advertisement for everything he wore. His hair has been tamed from messy into artfully tousled. His grin is a neon sign that spells out _fresh water!_ in the middle of a desert.

“Okay, so,” Sylvain continues, clapping his hands and spinning to slide into the kitchen again. He fidgets with a nervous energy as he circles on the oven. It sighs open under the press of his arm. There’s a set of dishes waiting inside. “Let’s call this _prix fixe_. You’re hungry, right?”

He laughs and tucks a strand of hair behind his ear. It falls back into place as soon as he turns to signal at the living room. Felix, still stupefied, follows the point of his fingers with his gaze to the coffee table. He’d never really understood the importance of a dining room. The kitchen bar had always suited him fine. Whatever Sylvain has planned, however, isn’t destined for ten inches of stainless steel. He’s somehow acquired a sharply-ironed tablecloth, which has been smoothed over the low table. It’s topped with a plate filled with a tidy arrangement of fresh-baked bread and butter scooped into quenelles. More plates wait empty and neatly placed, eager for whatever it is that Sylvain has left warming in the oven.

“To start: octopus carpaccio or Caprese salad, or both, if you want. For the _primi_ , radicchio and cheese cannelloni,” Sylvain adds, every part the perfect server as he describes their meal with gusto, “and then, _monsignor_ , ossobucco with risotto alla milanese— I think that one’s got your name all over it— or involtini di pesce spada— that’s swordfish. They said it was a house speciality. Uh,” he pauses, his voice clenching with nerves, which he tries to tease out with another bashful roll of laughter, “and then some sort of panna cotta, but I can’t remember which sort. Not too sweet. They promised.” He winks. “I thought you’d get pissed if I got wine, so Pellegrino it is. For what it’s worth, a Montepulciano would’ve been nice.”

Felix drops his briefcase. He steps forward, not bothering with his shoes. They leave wet footprints on the floorboards. Sylvain’s eyes crinkle at the corners along with his widening grin. He’s happy. Alive. Unbroken. Here. _Now_. Felix catches him before he disappears again, thumbs sliding over his jaw and along his cheekbones as he pulls him into a kiss.

Sylvain stiffens, startled, his lips still parted by his apology about wine pairings. Felix dips his tongue into the heat of his mouth. A molten drip of satisfaction dribbles down his spine when he feels Sylvain finally flatten his tongue against his own. His hands brush over Felix’s shoulders. Felix shifts to help him tug at his coat. They slip it off together into a crumpled pile at Felix’s heels. The plate of carpaccio skitters across the countertop when Sylvain plants an elbow there, using the leverage to pull Felix closer against him.

He used to smell like cigarettes and expensive cologne. Felix remembers every note. Cigarettes, because he was an addict of the undiscriminating sort; cologne, because when he didn’t wear it the acridity of everything he swallowed seeped through his pores; expensive, because he’d been wealthy, once, more than the Blaiddyds, even, and that the most dangerous bullet of all of them loaded and cocked against his temple.

Now he smells like the juniper body wash that Felix had bought by mistake two months prior and left untouched on the shelf in the shower. His clothes have been washed in Felix’s detergent. They smell like his bedsheets. It stirs a bestial possessiveness awake in the deepest parts of Felix’s chest. The feeling runs counter to the rest of him, desperate to press each inch of his body to Sylvain’s to test if he’s really there at all.

He’s imagined kissing him again across a million different permutations. It’s long become a bad habit. No matter who he’s with, he slips Sylvain into their clothes. Dimitri had been the worst, perhaps, but also the most convincing. And yet, despite all of the rehearsal, the real thing doesn’t go according to plan. Felix doesn’t tear at Sylvain’s buttons or shove him to his knees. He kisses him simply to kiss him: on the lips, slow and searching; on the trio of freckles perched at the rightward corner of his mouth; against his leaping pulse; along the shelf of his crooked-mended collarbone.

When Felix guides him from the kitchen out into the hall it’s not out of rushed vindication, but rather because the countertop has started to wear red lines into the backs of Sylvain’s forearms. They slowly dance deeper into the apartment. Sylvain nudges Felix into a detour against the sectional. Felix leans against the stiff cushion while Sylvain unwinds the scarf from his neck and slips his loosened tie— tugged askew hours before with frustration, then still spilled in the light from Felix’s monitor at work—apart. Sylvain’s breath spills against his throat. Felix catches it in his mouth. He sighs when he feels Sylvain’s fingers in his hair, teasing at the twisted knot that keeps it upswept at his nape. He’d always liked it long. Felix, younger and bitter, had thought it was because it reminded him of all the dark-haired girls he used to chase. It takes him too long to understand the truth of it.

Felix pushes Sylvain into the hall again and takes the lead in guiding him towards his bedroom. Sylvain falters and eyes the door with apprehension. There’s a thin line drawn between the world and the intimacy of Felix’s room. They know each other well enough to see it splashed against the floorboards. Felix steps between his legs to urge him onwards. Not to throw him onto the bed like he’s sometimes imagined, full of vitriol and hunger, but rather because the rest of the apartment, and everything outside it, is filled with nothing but brutalist shapes.

They spill together onto the soft pillow of the mattress. It’s dark. Felix swims through it for a moment, familiar enough with Sylvain’s shape to kiss him by the feel of their noses brushing against one another. Soon enough he grows too greedy for the shadows and lifts himself up by the elbows to lean towards the beside lamp. The drawer below comes next. He pillages it with shaking hands. Sylvain watches him with heavy-lidded eyes in his sprawl between Felix’s bent knees.

“Felix.”

The sound of his voice makes Felix’s breath catch in his throat. Sylvain soothes it down into his lungs with long, looping circles palmed against his thighs. He looks different in the lamplight, but mostly he looks the same. That’s the damned thing about it, isn’t it?

Felix plucks the buttons open down the center of Sylvain’s shirt. Next his belt, his fly, his briefs. Sylvain stops him only to kiss him in between each layer. He looks like an antiquity unveiled for the first time in a long, long while. The luster in the marble has dulled and dimpled. Somehow the perfection of his physique seems better off for the wear. It doesn’t matter, in any case. Felix will put him on a pedestal. Fuck. He always has.

All the same, he’s still Sylvain. Felix has to remind himself of the fact even when his own shirt is peeled off and his slacks get tossed akimbo. There’s poetry in that moment. Science, in the symmetry of their bodies pressed together. Those things have never meant shit to Sylvain. He doesn’t listen to music. He doesn’t weep when he watches the classics. Black and white, technicolor— its all the same to him. His master isn’t inspiration. It’s never been the divine. It’s dopamine, with a capital D, in flashing, fluorescent lights.

So Felix keeps silent except for gasps and breathy moans until he’s built the nerve to tear open the first pack on the strip of condoms fished from his drawer. He waits wordless until after he slides himself into Sylvain. The ugly things living in the back of Sylvain’s skull finally wake up. They watch him from inside his dilated pupils and cry out hungrily for more.

“Sylvain,” he breathes. He feels the volcanic rush of Sylvain’s full, unadulterated attention. The urge to bite him hard enough to bruise resurfaces from old daydreams. He tempers it with a kiss that leaves them both shivering. “Please. Don’t go. Don’t leave again.”

“Oh,” Sylvain gasps. He lurches upwards to press his sweaty brow against Felix’s. “Never. Felix. _Felix_. Never again.”

* * *

Sylvain strides with bare-assed bravado into the living room. Felix, watching with exhausted amusement from a crumpled pile of pillows on his bed, expects him to do something about the things strewn across the floor. Maybe he’ll finally mute the album that’s been playing on repeat for hours. Instead he disappears into the kitchen. Felix hears the clatter of the oven door. The pad of Sylvain’s bare feet. He’s grinning like a lottery winner when he finally saunters back into the bedroom, his arms filled with cold veal shank and a plate of tomato slices dripping balsamic vinegar onto the carpet and, at last, across the off-white duvet.

“Sylvain!”

“Sorry! Sorry,” Sylvain yelps, tipping the plate upwards to catch the final drop with his arm. He nudges the veal in Felix’s direction apologetically. Felix decides to write off all of the bedding as a loss. It must be nearly two in the morning. He doesn’t mind admitting that he’s hungry, at least.

“ _Bon appetit_ ,” Sylvain offers as he settles himself cross-legged at Felix’s side. Felix considers pointing out their lack of silverware before deciding against it and reaching forward to take a pinchful of risotto from the plate. It’s delicious, even ice cold.

“Shit,” he manages.

“Right?”

“This must have been expensive.”

“Bankrupted me,” Sylvain agrees. He pops a disc of creamy buffalo mozzarella into his mouth. “ _So_ worth it.”

“You didn’t have to do all of this,” Felix adds guiltily. Sylvain shrugs.

“You need to eat better.”

“Sylvain.”

“And you work too much,” Sylvain protests. He dives forward to pull a tender bite of veal from Felix’s plate before he can stop him. “Honestly, Felix, it’s _Friday night_.”

“That’s rich, coming from you,” Felix balks. “Do you charge for life advice?”

Sylvain grins. “Huh. That’s an idea. Better than being a barista. I burned the shit out of my thumb yesterday. There’s an art to it, you know.”

“Don’t tell me you’re about to get fired.”

“Maybe,” admits Sylvain with a boyish mouthful of laughter. “It’s alright. I’ll find something else.”

Felix sucks the demi-glace from his fingers. “Be serious. You can’t do odd jobs for the rest of your life.”

Sylvain sets the plate of tomatoes aside and turns suddenly grim. It makes the heady feeling in Felix’s chest settle slightly. For the first time in a while he realizes that he’s naked. There’s no time to do anything about it, but something in Sylvain’s pose changes, too.

“Listen,” Sylvain begins, dragging his sticky fingers through his hair, “there is something that’s been on my mind. I won’t do anything if you don’t like it,” he quickly adds, eyes settling on Felix’s with enough gravity that he knows he’s telling the truth, “but a few months ago some Feds reach out to me about my dad. They think they can finally nail him. Racketeering. The whole deal. He’ll go down for it. He’ll rot in jail for the rest of his life, not that he deserves the peace and quiet. They just have a few last holes to fill. You know Dad. He always dreamed that I’d be his crooked fucking _consigliere_. I know I can get what they need.”

Felix muscles freeze into stiff, uncomfortable shapes. He feels the first sharp corners of a snarl forming on his lips. “You came to Fhirdiad just to rat on Ambrose?”

“No,” Sylvain immediately answers. He snatches at Felix, keeping a firm hold around one of his wrists before he has the chance to dart away. “I came to Fhirdiad because the offer made me think about what I want to do with myself, and as soon as I started thinking about that, I knew I didn’t want to do anything that would make you...I don’t know, finally give up on me. I don’t think it’ll be dangerous, but I won’t do it if you’re not up for it. I mean, Dad’s basically retired. They’ll find some other pig to fry.” He rubs his thumb over the top of Felix’s hand, eyes downcast. He’s taking stock again. Is it worth it to lie? “But he killed Mik. Everybody knows it.”

“Mik,” Felix repeats, flabbergasted. “You want to mess with your dad because of _Miklan_? He ruined your life, Sylvain.”

“Yeah. So did Dad, and so did I, and so did everybody. It’s not worth keeping that kind of score. It was all just luck, anyway. If it hadn’t have been him, it would’ve been me.”

“He wouldn’t have given a damn about you,” Felix argues tightly, “if you’d been in his shoes.”

“Maybe not.” Sylvain smoothes another circle into Felix’s skin. “But I’ve got to start unfucking things up.”

Felix sighs. “Shit.” He rubs his eyes. “You’ve got a real screwed up understanding of how to get right, you know that?”

“Yeah,” Sylvain laughs. “I could always do something else. Figure out how to make a latte.” He lifts Felix’s hand to his lips and presses them conciliatory against his knuckles. “Get a desk job.” He places another kiss on the sunken spot where Felix broke his hand three years before. “Nine-to-five, commuter trains. Bare-knuckle cage fighting on the weekends.”

“It’s not,” Felix sputters, squirming without any conviction to toss him away, “ _bare-knuckle cage fighting_ , and what are you trying to say? Have you got a problem with how I live my life?”

“Yes! You’re miserable, Felix.”

“I’m not miserable.” Felix glowers as Sylvain trails his kisses down the back of his arm. “You think I should follow you instead? Go commando on your shady fucking dad?”

“No,” Sylvain instantly replies. “No way. I don’t want you anywhere near that. But maybe a little excitement in your life wouldn’t hurt. A washed up, has-been, disgraced ex-junkie _double agent_ —”

“You’re not a spy—”

“—good-looking, great in bed—”

“ _Sylvain_.”

“—in love with you—”

“In love with me?” Felix challenges. It’s an admission that’s seven years late. Sylvain seems to know that, too. He peeks at Felix over his arm, eyes filled with nervy dedication. The warm bed is nothing like that summer night they’d spent together when Felix had started the first part of this back and forth confession. Maybe it matters. Maybe it doesn’t.

“In love with you,” Sylvain agrees, voice muffled by the flesh of Felix’s forearm. “Just think about it.”

Felix sighs. Sylvain’s lips brush against his skin in a smile. He leans closer to nip at Felix’s shoulder before burying his nose in his hair. “I’ll think about it,” Felix concedes lowly. Sylvain nods and presses a kiss just below the lobe of his ear.

“Think about it,” he repeats.

It doesn’t matter what he’s asking. Felix knows—and he knows that Sylvain knows, and with the same absolute certainty—that he’ll agree. He lets himself linger in the last moments of ambiguity in order to mourn his perfectly normal, respectable life. The album playing in an endless loop in the living room slips into its final track. He recognizes the trumpets from the moment when he’d first walked through the door earlier that night, still terrified that they’d somehow missed their last chance to catch each other. He threads the fingers of his right hand through Sylvain’s and squeezes until he feels him squeeze back. 

_“Some others I’ve seen,”_ the voice croons from outside, dripping with whisky and enough overwrought nostalgia that suddenly it’s poetry. _“Might never been mean, might never be crossed or try to be bossed. But they wouldn’t do. For nobody else gave me a thrill, with all your faults, I love you still. It had to be you, wonderful you. It had to be you.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! 
> 
> (Trivia: in true “leave the gun, take the cannoli” editing fashion, the mob elements of this fic were supposed to be much more center stage, but for pacing’s sake I decided to let Felix and Sylvain skip a few misunderstandings to get straight to the Italian food and Frank Sinatra (see lyrics in text). Sex and food is always best.)


End file.
